A hedge fund legend is psyched about an 'incomprehensible' market opportunity

When a visionary tech investor like Art Samberg throws his weight
behind a project you can bet it’s going to be something special,
but when you are talking about solving the world’s energy crisis,
perhaps it’s time to get really excited.

Since winding down Pequot Capital
Management in 2009 – at one time the world’s biggest hedge fund
with over $15 billion at the height of the technology boom,
Samberg reinvented himself as a venture capitalist through family
office Hawkes Financial.

And it’s the clean energy sector
that’s taking up his time at the moment, more specifically
producing clean electricity, as the biggest investor in Tri Alpha
Energy.

With over $500 million of equity
money raised already, Tri Alpha made a major breakthrough last
year, using plasma technology to control the fusion reaction
needed to generate power. While there is still plenty of work to
do, Samberg told Real Vision in a recent interview that the firm
is well on its way to its goal of producing clean electricity,
without a steam turbine, for just pennies per kilowatt
hour.

“I don't care what you think
about anything. Whether you deny climate change, whether you're
for it, there's one indisputable fact. And that is that to get
out of poverty, people need energy. And you know there are a
billion people in this world living with no electricity, and they
live a miserable, miserable life. They burn wood, which is
horrific for you.”

Samberg explained that a great
deal more energy is released in fusion compared to fission and
there are no safety concerns unlike nuclear fission. The big risk
is that the reaction ceases, with everything just stopping if the
gas hits the containment wall, so the key is keeping the reaction
stable, which is why the plasma development was so
important.

Compact Toroid Injector
Test StandTri
Alpha

“Nobody has been able to control a plasma in steady state for a
long period of time. We have a scientific advisory panel of Nobel
laureates, Marshall prize winners, which are the physics
equivalent of a Nobel. And they certified that we've done it,”
Samberg said. “Now we have to tear down the old plant, increase
the energy level, and prove that we can scale the temperature up.
And we're in the midst of doing that.

$500 Million Venture Will be Bigger Than Big

With this technology, Tri Alpha
aims to get the cost of electricity down to $0.02 a kilo watt
hour, from an initial $0.05, with no carbon, he said.

“And if you were to just put in a
$25-a-ton carbon payment, the plant would come for free, as it
turns out. So this is bigger than big. And we're making great
progress. You don't raise $500 million from smart people unless
there's something there,” he said.

The key question of course is
will it work. “I sure as hell hope so,” Samberg said. “I've
put a lot of effort and money in it. My gut is, obviously, I
think it's going to work, or I wouldn't have gotten this far. My
education and background says so. Everybody else tries to combine
deuterium and tritium…. The problem with that is it's a great
science result, but it's highly, highly radioactive. So you've
got something that proves fusion, but it's not commercially
viable. We went, what is commercially viable? And that is to use
hydrogen with boron, which is the next element up on the chart of
elements.

“We're just dealing with hydrogen
so far. We don't exactly know what's going to happen. We think we
know, but we don't exactly know. So there are challenges ahead.
And you have to be a fool not to recognize that.

An Incomprehensible Market Opportunity

For now, the focus is on
rebuilding the plant to get ten times the level of power that
they had originally, which he said will prove their ability to
scale the temperature, while it will take around five years from
2018 to build the demo plant. All in all, it could be sometime
between 2025 and 2030 before commercial plants will be
shipped.

Tri Alpha

“The market is so huge. It's almost incomprehensible,” he said.
“We're talking about-- number one and our model will be the
Qualcomm model, where Qualcomm came up with CDMA, licensed to
South Korea, and the whole cell phone business was born. And
Qualcomm is a beautiful company.

“That's a big market, and we all
know about cell phones. But there's nothing bigger than power
generation. So I won't get into all the numbers. But on a
technology licensing model basis, this thing is so big, that it's
almost incomprehensible. And it's also a cool thing because it
really is very rare where you get to number one, I like
monopolies, if I own the monopolies.

“So obviously, as a capitalist I
like this. But it's also great to be out in front of something
that's so important scientifically, and it's so important to the
welfare of mankind. Whether you deny that carbon is a big problem
today, any rational person looking at this thing and stepping
back will say, someday this is untenable. And so any solution to
that, that's a great thing to say I was a part of.”